keynote speakers
Gualter Cunha
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(University of Porto)
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Gualter Cunha is a recently retired Full Professor of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities – Universidade do Porto, and a senior member of CETAPS – the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies. His fields of academic activity are English Studies and Translation, with particular research interests in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Contemporary English Literature and Literary Translation (English-Portuguese). Recent publications straddle the fields of Modernism, Literature and Empire, and Translation.
Frances Dickey
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(University of Missouri)
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Frances Dickey works in T. S. Eliot studies and teaches modernist literature at the University of Missouri. She is the author of The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound and co-editor of Volume 3 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, and the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. A past president of the International T. S. Eliot Society, she has published essays on modern poetry in Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, the New England Quarterly, and other venues. Recently her blog and articles have been exploring the Eliot-Emily Hale correspondence as well as the place of St. Louis in Eliot’s writing.
Declan Kiberd
(University of Notre Dame)
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Declan Kiberd is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English and Irish Language and Literature Emeritus, University of Notre Dame.
A leading international authority on the literature of Ireland, he has authored scores of articles and many books, including Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Irish Literature, Irish Classics, The Irish Writer and the World, Inventing Ireland, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece, (with P.J. Mathews) Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Political and Cultural Writings 1891-1922 (Abbey Theatre Press, 2015; University of Notre Dame Press, 2016) and After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (Harvard University Press, 2018). He is currently finishing a book called Beckett Unknown: Mysticism without God and a short book about cricket, England and Eternity.
Declan Kiberd has lectured in some 30 countries worldwide and contributes essays and reviews to the Irish Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.
Fran O’Rourke
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(University College Dublin)
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Fran O’Rourke is emeritus professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin. A graduate of University College Galway, he studied in Vienna, Cologne, Louvain, and Leuven. He has held Fulbright and Onassis fellowships, and in 2003 was Visiting Research Professor at Marquette University.
He has published widely on Plato, Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Aquinas, and Heidegger. His book Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Brill, 1992), described by Alasdair MacIntyre as “one of the two or three most important books on Aquinas published in the last fifty years”, was reissued by Notre Dame Press in 2005. In 2016 he published Aristotelian Interpretations, a collection of essays on Aristotle. His recently published James Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, has been praised by Martha Nussbaum for its “meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship”, and by Morris Beja for its “notable scholarly and critical insight and genuine brilliance”. As well as philosophical influences on Joyce, he has researched Joyce’s use of Irish traditional song and has given recitals of Joyce-related songs in many venues from Shanghai to San Diego (joycesong.info).
